Along with the presupposition that misogyny must spring from conservatism often comes the notion that transgression and countercultural gestures are somehow incompatible with it. But women have long figured in the countercultural imagination as agents of conformity and avatars of a vain, mindless consumerism. It seems to me that this is the tradition that 4chan and the wider beta-sphere, perhaps unknowingly, are really carrying on. ...

Long before the postwar counterculture emerged, Emma Bovary symbolized the dreary and banal feminine massification of culture for nineteenth-century culture rebels. Channeling this same tradition, the beta world inveighs continually against the advanced feminization and massification of Internet-age culture. This is why their misogyny sits so comfortably alongside their mix of geeky and countercultural styles and why the pat ‘hegemonic masculinity’ answer is so inadequate.